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The Quiet Letter, a platform dedicated to contemporary literature, is based in India and operates from a small provincial town. Editor Pawan N. Hira recently interviewed me. The poetry world is indeed great and small, global and local.

I started writing poems in college and have been been playing with language ever since. To support my family, for many years I taught writing and literature at UT Brownsville and held several administrative positions. Now I am writing full time.

Which three words best describe your poetry?

Precise. Vivid. Imagistic.

Tell us about China Sketchbook. What was its genesis?

A few years ago my wife and I took a month-long trip across China, which was a stunning experience. I’ve long admired Chinese poetry and knew a little Chinese history, so to observe how China is transforming itself and to meet many of its people made for an unforgettable journey. I began drafting poems along the way, and I continued after returning home. China Sketchbookcontains 27 poems, and Virtual Artists Collective was kind enough to publish it under its Purple Flag imprint in December 2016.

I’m sure you’re frequently asked this question, but I can’t resist: What carries you from the blank page to a poem? What is your process?

Usually I sit down to explore something I’ve seen or heard or experienced or thought about. What images can I find to get the poem started? Where do they want or need to go? Which words support the movement of the poem and give it the energy it needs to become a language-object that others might enjoy experiencing? Through this process I hope to create poems that are authentic and original.

A few months ago you published At Paisano Ranch, a micro-chapbook, with Origami Poems Project. What can you tell us about this book?

In September 2016, I began a four-month stay as writer-in-residence at Paisano Ranch in Austin, once owned by the legendary Texas writer J. Frank Dobie. You and I met at the ranch several times and talked about poetry, and I was intrigued by the charming micro-chapbook that you had published through Origami Poems Project called You Break What Falls. So I took six poems I had written about my experiences at the ranch and sent them off to OPP, and the editors accepted the micro-manuscript and published At Paisano Ranch in early December. I encourage poets and readers to visit the website, https://origamipoems.com, and download for free any of the micro-chapbooks that interest them. Poets may also wish to submit their own micro-manuscripts of six short poems.

What advice do you have for new poets?

Don’t be in a great rush to publish your work. Work at the craft of creating your poems, read your drafts out loud, and don’t be afraid to tinker with your poems, and even make extensive changes. You are engaging in the process of finding your distinctive voice, your distinctive style. When you’ve found that voice and style, you are ready to go public. And when you experience rejection, as all poets do, keep submitting your poems, and keep writing new ones.

I’ve long admired the great American poets of the past, including Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens. More recent sources of inspiration include Seamus Heaney, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Billy Collins. And even through translation, which can’t do full justice to the original language, I’ve been amazed at the power of the classical Chinese poets, such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Tao Qian.

What are you working on now, what’s in the pipeline, and what can we look forward to in the coming months?

I’ve recently completed a collection of poems called Mornings with Dobie’s Ghost, which is scheduled for publication in 2018 by Wings Press. I wrote the 35 poems while living and working at Paisano Ranch. And I’m in the middle of drafting a novel—my first—which has been a most challenging but stimulating experience.

Bio: Chip Dameron is the author of nine collections of poetry and a travel book. His poems and essays on contemporary writers have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Southwestern American Literature, San Pedro River Review, Puerto del Sol, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Borderlands, and many other journals and anthologies, as well as publications in Canada, Ireland, Nigeria, India, China, Thailand, and New Zealand.

Daniel lives on the island of Jeju, a self governing province of Korea, where he lives with his wife and dog and runs a guesthouse and cafe. When he isn’t cooking omelets or pasta you’ll find him by the sea searching for mermaids, fishermen or something peculiar, or just waiting for Jeju to come to him with poetry.

RO: What is the relationship of your environment, your daily surroundings, to your writing? What themes or traits will readers find in your work? What will they not find?

DPM: My environment, for the first time in my life, is the fuel for my poetry: if not for Jeju, i’d never have thought to make a character of myself, never would i have thought that my experience was of value, i’d never have cottoned on to using the environment around me rather than failing miserably to imagine or research a place i don’t know all that well. It sounds ridiculous, but the grass is always greener over there. i don’t like that proverb, but i succumb to it against my better judgement.

Jeju is split between the tourists & the locals. The tourists usually come from Seoul, are quite affluent & modernized. They zip from A-B, snapping selfies then rushing to the next place. It is uncomfortable watching them sometimes, how desperate they are to do as much as possible & never pausing to reflect or take in something first hand. This isn’t everyone, but it is a common feature of my day to day life: photo food, photo this, then that & not doing it with any attention, just point & click, a document to say I was there. i don’t get it, but i think conversation is for this. i just don’t get that sort of passivity when experiencing anything, it’s all we have.

The locals just work. If you don’t keep your eyes open you could miss them, huddled, retired over their task, in the fields. They look worn, disheveled from a life of wind, salt & soil caked hands. But they are strong, despite their average age being over 70.

Dichotomies expand into other areas, however the foundational essentials to spring board from are: people; weather, the effect of the elements on things, which is so noticeable on an island, knackered stuff, rust, debris outworn objects generally; work, hardship; abandonment, isolation, affluence, wastefulness, abundance, nature thriving in unlikely places, the ocean, critters, food, booze, nature generally- all are recurring themes along with whatever their opposites may be & the conflict or desire for resolution that i may be tousling with in my opinion attempts to clarify my position. i find having an opinion on anything difficult as someone can always counter it, we live in a Sophistic world.

Halla Mt, which is Jeju is always in the background & is frequently present in my poems too. The weather here is Bi-polar & it is just not possible to leave it out, especially as it seems to have done so much to the people, bringing them a rich soil & hard toil.

The mermaids too, the Haenyo, are a recurring feature; women who forage abalone, conchs & various mollusks, by hand, free diving, without oxygen, in all seasons. Their abilities, according to my friend who blogs at wearepagans.wordpress.com about Jeju shamanism, are similar to Wim Hof’s cold endurance. The tradition is 1500 years old & only their attire has been upgraded: they now have wet suits.

i knew when i started writing about Jeju that i wanted recurring themes, motifs is probably more apt. After reading Walcott’s White Egrets, which has some wonderful motifs, i knew i could do something similar with Jeju.

Alcohol: Jeju fishermen, construction workers & farmers like to drink, not like, need to drink. Soju, a non-distilled spirit & makkoli usually crop up in the poems as they are drank at all times of day. Makkoli is especially popular & useful as it is made with just fomented rice & tastes good. After a bottle you get a surge of energy & both fight off the numbing cold wind of winter. The chap who did our electrics during the construction of our guesthouse would turn up, ask for a bottle of makkoli, get it down him in three bowls, one gulp each, then & only then would he start any work. For lunch despite rice, soup & side dishes on offer, he would eat just a few mouthfuls of green onion kimchi & a bottle or two of makkoli. i asked if he ate or drank anything else, he said no. He worked damn hard & even though pushing 70 he looked much younger & suffered from no ill health.

Drinking in Korea is just part of life, there are no taboos really, i can’t really think of any, even women get shit faced.

As to what you won’t find here, i suppose you won’t find a lot of comfort because comfort is a dichotomy of so much discomfort; so my mention of it will usually be focused on the irony. i have never been interested in the usual comforts people feel they need or deserve. i have never lived in a nice house or flat, never had a nice comfy bed. i have always made do, because that is how i like to live. If i wasn’t like this i could not have built a guesthouse, i could not endure the loneliness i have lived with nor take leaps in the dark.

i can’t really appease this yearning after comfort, as i am in direct contact with local people every day, i live in a house like theirs, i work as much as them (not as hard) & though i don’t pity them (they don’t require it, they aren’t vulnerable, they make do with anything) i can’t help but see that tourism, which is an industry that designs retreat into comfort (because that is what people deserve) is responsible. You can learn a lot about what you really need in life from these kinds of people.

This is a tousle with myself too, a tousle with the guilt i feel for using good land to shelter the hordes of tourists which have encroached on the local people’s lives with so much disregard. Yes tourism creates work, but it also means mass development & pollution & the buying up of land for monstrous development projects. For example, from the tea fields, you used to have an unobstructed, incredible view of Halla Mt, the serried contours of tea bushes rippling to the horizon & in the background, Halla. Then someone thought it a good idea to build a science park, space museum, a superfluously big, ugly, grey, eye sore that completely blocks the once dramatic spectacle. i can’t forgive the (list of expletives) persons who have done this. It is the fate of this island. & i just worry what will happen when there is no construction work left to be done & all the workmen & companies that have prospered have no work: will Jeju go beyond its means to accommodate the loss or will they have to exodus to an already ballooning Seoul? The companies will have to lay off a lot of working men. That day isn’t more than a decade or two away.

My wife always says Jeju will be like Elysium, not the Greek sort, the Matt Damon sort. We may think Elysium is a natural progress of society, but it doesn’t have to be, a constant agitation to get more comfort is just daft. Experiencing a little discomfort, even hardship & spending the emotional expense it takes to overcome teaches you a lot about yourself you never knew; you may have to experience anger, depression, sadness, loneliness, but you’ll have these emotions with equal amounts of ecstasy, bliss, & joy- how boring would life be if you were just happy all the time? Think of all the great works of poetry & how much variety of emotion is there.

RO: And your creative process? Could you offer us a glimpse into how your poems develop from first glimmer to fully realized piece? Do you follow a regular writing routine?

DPM: My poems always get written on the move. i am almost always doing something else, with poetry in my thoughts. i never let my focus on the external falter, it is always on the alert for potential effects on the internal, or for a possible conversion into a poem. If you want to be a poet & you’re relationship between the implicate & explicate orders (to lend Bohm’s terminology) are out of synch, then you best sort it out else the poetry is going to suffer.

Sometimes, it is just one of those flashes, which Nabokov so elegantly has John Shade soliloquize about in Pale Fire, or what Heidegger called the grant. Without these moments of constructive, economic, inspiration a poem isn’t really complete: i am very uncomfortable with a poem i have thought my way through too much. Those sorts of flashes are indicative of the feeling of the poet to roll out something that has a direct appeal to sense, & sense has peeled away at; a line only that poet could have written, because it comes from a portion of themselves that is unique to their mind, as if every experience was being granted the status of original & new, therefore the line comes out uninfluenced by another thing, person, poet, anecdote, from anything at all. Hart Crane for me is the master of this & Michael Symmons Roberts too. You just need one of these, they are the herbs & spices of poetry.

Once that first flash of a line or idea arrives, there is usually a concatenation of ideas relating from it, like a spider diagram that comes in fits & starts over the space of anything from a few hours to days. If this doesn’t start to happen, i will give it a few days, even a week depending on the strength of the theme or line, but if nothing develops it gets relegated to my fragments, in case i get deja vu at some later time & realize an experience relating to that moment has sprung the long abandoned attempt into action.

If in my pocket notebook a good chunk of poem gets out of me, i’ll start to craft. i seldom craft on the move, this is the time where i have to sit down & copy what i have out, because when the lines appear they often appear in form, there is already metrical stability in them, but they are a jumble in my pocket notebook. i copy them out into a manuscript sized book to give myself space to breathe- to hurry out alternative lines, test synonyms, antonyms, similes, grammar, punctuation. If i can spot that i have organically used quite a few end rhymes, the poem may get mashed into something lyrical. Once i’ve rearranged & tormented the work enough i type it up onto the computer. Each time the poem is moved through this progression, a word, or the line breaks get altered & even a few days to a week after the poem has been typed i read over it closely, read it out loud, live with it to make sure it is as it should be. i don’t think i can say that, there can always be rearrangements, Auden was right, but you just have to call it a day or you’ll nitpick. If Dylan Thomas hadn’t been so finicky, he could have written many more high quality poems, but he spent so much time agonizing, fastidiously over his vocabulary choices; it is easy to align this attention with the standard of poetry, but i do think it can become a burden on productivity.

This method works for me, it has something of the production line about it, but like the sieve that captures all the chaff, so my movement of the poem through stages means i can construct the poem cautiously.

I hope to offer monthly Q&A sessions with some of my favorite poets. Daniel Paul Marshall is the first of these.

Daniel lives on the island of Jeju, a self governing province of Korea, where he lives with his wife and dog and runs a guesthouse and cafe. When he isn’t cooking omelets or pasta you’ll find him by the sea searching for mermaids, fishermen or something peculiar, or just waiting for Jeju to come to him with poetry.

RO: Daniel, please tell us how or why you turned to writing poetry?

DPM: i wrote poems in school when puberty hit. i was your typical awkward teenager, overrun with puppy fat & a face full of zits. i wrote poems about the pretty girls, & in as cliché a mode as is conceivable, pined for their affections. All very silly. i sent one to some poetry website, which you could enter a poem into the database of, which automatically became placed in a competition. i got some letter months later from said website saying my poem was picked as a semi-finalist & that i was to go to Washington for a ceremony & what not. My parents were more naïve than me (this was the early days of the internet) heaping praise on me & wondering where this poetry ability came from. i was dubious about it. My poem wasn’t that good, even i knew that. So i sent another, but this time i wrote it to be terrible on purpose. Lo & behold i got a letter in the post a couple weeks later with the same invitation but for this new more terrible poem. This was my inception into poetry writing. From the beginning i was critical of myself to stop me from any delusion & to make me improve.

There was then a yawning gap, as school life in small town England wasn’t exactly a burgeoning environment of sensitive poetic sorts. i carried my sensitivity, knowing i’d one day be able to do something with it when i got older.

It was when i started the independent student life at university, living away from home that i began to seriously study & the desire to be a good poet took hold. i knew i was no good, but i was in for the long haul. i had made a decision with myself.

When i started reading poetry every day in my early twenties, what struck me about it was how poetry had this capacity to express what no other medium can express, that there is something inherent in the presentation of emotion & reality in the poem, which can only be expressed with poetry’s parameters. That expressiveness is multi-tiered, multi-dimensional & i base entirely on speculation reinforced by my trust in my sensibilities & i am sure anyone dedicated to an art will have something similar to say- & i wouldn’t quarrel with them.

i first began writing imitations in university & practicing using metrical forms. i read the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics avidly, learning new techniques & then putting them into practice; this taught me the modalities, the nuances & methods of poetry. i figured out sound, form & function. i also cut my teeth on new words i learned whilst reading poetry & yes, the dictionary, developing a sense for the various or sometimes, limited contexts they can be used in.

Poetry took on an importance for me, an importance attributed not just to the acoustics of words, but to the potential expression in metrical style, scansion, grammar, punctuation, the whole lark of the poetic act became a complex system, which i could wrap my head around. i am not a smart person, everything i do is achieved through trial & error, until it gets done. i have this method of doing things because my memory is poor, a problem i share with Michael Hoffman, which makes me feel much better about it. So poetry was the first complex system that i could grasp. Systems fascinate me, especially poetic, religious or philosophical systems. This undertaking to get at the nuts & bolts of poetry was due to my lecturer, Nikolai Duffy, who told me a poet can only break with established forms & develop a voice when they fully understand poetic technique. i am still learning, but i am past the shaky knees, quivering lips stage of no-confidence.

RO: Would you offer up some of your influences – poetic and otherwise. What about their work intrigues you?

DPM: During university i just read as widely as possible & took advantage of a library crammed with potential influences. During this time, experience never had any say in poetry: i was fascinated by the long narrative poems of Blake, Shelley & their inspiration, Milton. i also read a lot of Robert Browning & Gerard Manley Hopkins. My early poetic projects were ambitious epics i didn’t have the poetic resource of mind to complete, i’d get maybe 100 lines in & hit a brick wall.

The expansion of the interior spiritual mood was an experience i wanted to conduct in myself; so i read a lot of religious literature: the Upanishads, Bodhidharma, Lao Tzu, Jung, in hope of giving the poets i read a spiritual context beyond the time span of their generation. i was very uncomfortable with reading a writer just in relation to the zeitgeist: everything seemed like just another way of expressing something hidden within every person, which if understood could alter mankind’s problem with itself. i believed poetry could completely overhaul the world for the better if we only figure out that literature is one whole expression of this in disparate parts.

i don’t believe this now. Perhaps some other time could be used for why my mind changed as it is a long & not that interesting story.

It was reading the Modernists & (for want of a better word) the Confessionalists such as Berryman, Lowell & Roethke who first gave me reason to see experiential poetry as containing some value. My first almost successful, ambitious project was a parody of Berryman’s Dream Songs, called the Lucid Sutras, in which a proganist, Candlewick was flanked by a Blakean spectre whose name changed depending on Candlewick’s mood & another inner voice called Subhuti. Candlewick had numerous mis-adventures ever tugged between his Id, Ego & Super Ego personas. i wrote them in what i called fractured terza rima, rather than Berryman’s broken sonnets. i think i got 50 poems in before i’d used up all i’d learned ever & ran out of steam, abandoning the project. i’d done nothing yet, to stoke the embers.

i have never really been inspired directly by a poet, not consciously. i tend to borrow their forms.

What influences me these days is my environment. i am very fortunate to live in a place very remote from British or Western culture. & it is the similarities to Western cultures against the backdrop of so much difference, which in itself can spawn more difference. i don’t know if that just makes sense in my head. It often feels analogous to coming across the latest issue of Cosmopolitan in the Vatican library, it just becomes so odd that it provokes a questioning response & this has somehow honed my visual stimuli, which has become converted into poetry.

This was the hardest question to answer. i realize that anything that once influenced me has now been rebelled against or brushed aside. i want to write the song of myself for once. i have only been writing myself for about a year. i have been writing poetry for ten years almost & i am only 30 so a long time in the making.

RO: Who are some of your favorite contemporary creatives?

DPM: i am very new to reading or looking at contemporary poetry or art. So i can’t really give as good an answer as i would like, but i’ll give it a shot. Since using the internet better, i have discovered a variety of exceptional writers. Michael Symmons Robert’s last book of poems Drysalter has been a read i refer back to, as his vocabulary & capacity to focus on something expansive in just 15 lines is astonishing. The book is a series of 150 poems each 15 lines each & what he achieves with those constraints is the sign of a master at work. Some very relevant meditations & his ability to distance himself from what seem like fictionalized accounts, but may be his own experiences, we just aren’t sure, but he staggers, whatever his mode. His use of simple lines packed full of sentiment & emotion that leaves you offering your heart to him is monumental; in one poem O song, there is a verse that if i can write a verse half as good in my entire life i’ll hop off the mortal coil finally proud of myself, it goes

O man of sorrows, I missed youas you passed me in the street last night.The wind funneled between buildings,blew grit into my eyes, fine sandmiles from the sea. I am so sorry.

I still haven’t landed on exactly what the apology is for at the end, but it breaks my heart into sea lace.

Will Self is two novels into a trilogy, he has written Umbrella & Shark, both of which are mind bending novels exploring the depths & potential of stream of consciousness. Though i don’t read much prose, Self’s novels are works i anticipate as his language & style is inimical. When i first dived (under?) into Umbrella the shock of the style gave me a feeling of vertigo. You sort of spiral into, as if on a helix-slide, but when you get your second wind, it is a joy & becomes really very palatable.

i have been fortunate enough to meet, through blogging, some poets who have helped me modernize, to be a writer in a contemporary sense rather than palely imitating a bygone era, which really has no relevance; just by reading them & getting out of the asinine opinion that only previous generations wrote good poetry has been a major, important reversal for me; you wouldn’t be reading this, i am sure of that without this awakening.

Jose Angel Araguz was really the first when i read his poetry published in The Inflectionist Review perhaps my favorite poetry journal & i am now fortunate enough to talk with him about his work, which is a pleasure. The tenderness with which he writes is astonishing, his Book of Flight is a triumph- aphoristic, taut poems which just make you want to pick up a pen & respond in some way, by annexing something to humanity’s literary oeuvre.

i recently read Tim Miller’sTo the House of the Sun, which is something i could hardly believe exists in this day & age; a civil war epic constructed from a vast accumulation of literature that Miller has mined over a ten year period to write an original piece of literature; he even went & lived in different parts of the country to learn more about the places he wanted to include in his protagonist’s journey. i was surprised by it as the epic poem is not a form people go for, for writing or reading. i think to attempt a renaissance of that form is admirable. In his own words, he says it is more a document for posterity. A behemoth of a text that just leaves you with mouth agape at his dedication to inspired literature from across all cultures. What i took from Miller was a reason to write: a hope that some future writer with Miller’s love of history & literature, who may mine the Millenials & write an entire text that tackles so many humane themes.

Our Bob here, he must be mentioned, not just because he has threatened his reputation by featuring me here, but we’ve all read his work & try to wrap our heads around his wonderful ability to juxtapose & poeticize what seem impossible to juxtapose & poeticize & in doing so brings so much joy to our ears & hearts.

i am not much of an art fan but i quite like the British artist Robert Nicol & Vladimir Kush; also Andrea Kowch is an immensely talented painter. Steve McCurry’s photography is tremendous. The abstract Berlin based artist Matt Kofflan, a friend & very talented chap is someone i never understood for a long time, till i opened my mind up to the contemporary world. His dye pieces look like nebulae bursting into form. You can check him out at mtkofflan.com. If i keep going it will start to get tedious i like so many things.

RO: Would you mind sharing a bit about your background? How did you come to run a guesthouse and cafe on Jeju Island?

DPM: i was a teacher for a few years in different parts of the country. i disliked it. It wasn’t shall we say, my cup of tea. My wife has always been a business minded person & owing to my dislike of my job, she bought some land & managed to formulate this plan. i should add that i gave half of my wages for a year toward the building & the land was bought with an investor’s money.

i was working in a mountainous region, teaching through the week & going to visit a monk on the weekend, where i would enjoy the quiet, learn a bit about building stuff, help the monk build paths & do renovations of his old property; practiced Korean too. During this time my wife worked in Seoul & started planning. i had actually told her i was going to return to England as the thought of teaching my whole life in Korea, was just something i couldn’t do; we weren’t married at the time. Sounds cruel doesn’t it, but Korea had taken its toll on me & the idea of staying for a woman seemed naïve, especially if i would be stuck doing something i don’t need to do that makes me unhappy; i didn’t want to pass my depression on, i thought it best to return to England, but…

i was prepared to work hard building something though as i had been interested in Jung’s Bollingen tower & also Gary Snyder & even Kenneth Burke, who all built things, whether paths, houses or meditation rooms. i could only do this because of being open to a rough lifestyle; the comfort of classrooms & city life makes me tense up.

The only experience i’d had was helping the monk, but that was a wholly other kind of construction, pretty basic stuff, metal sheeting & just drilling; next thing i know i’m mixing concrete, chopping wood, hauling 40kg bags of cement, tying iron strips, carrying bricks in a backpack up a scaffold- really hoving into the teeth of it. i grumbled, it was bloody hard, but i felt proud of myself for once; because i was doing something hard & i’d only ever done things that made me bored before, work wise at least.

My wife decided to build a café too as i impressed her with how quickly i learned to cook things & how popular western food is with Koreans. It is a novelty thing, no different to how we see other cuisines in the West. It was a no brainer for her. i don’t cook too badly, but to Koreans it is very impressive if only because it feels like an authentic, Western culinary experience. You can find some fine roasteries on the island too, so serving coffee is always a good idea. i serve hand dripped coffee only & the beans are superb. We have nothing of this sort of quality in Britain: coffee is terrible in England.

i often feel i fall into things, i just never say no to an opportunity, as long as when i gauge it in relation to something ordinary it seems like something unique & grand, i’ll hop on board.

We’ll continue this Q&A in a few days, but let’s end today’s portion with one of Daniel’s poems.

the heron

ㄹ

look here see the heron, stiff as a quill, as elegant,
its slow footing, sostenuto, its flight, encumbered almost,

A MockingHeart Review Conversation with Robert Okaji, author of If Your Matter Could Reform (Dink Press, 2015)

MHR: Hi, Robert. I am glad we have this opportunity to talk to one another about your new chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform. I have a few questions which I hope will illuminate us.

RO: Thank you, Clare. I’m thrilled that you asked.

MHR: The first poem is “Wind” which introduces us to the ethereal voice that has a calming effect but also the authority and power to speak the deepest questions that you explore in the book. I love the wind motif that blows in and out of poems, like a wind. What does the wind signify to you and what can we learn, formally, from paying attention to your use of it?